The emergence of the cloud for computing applications has increased the demand for off-site installations termed data centers that store data and run applications accessed by remotely connected computer device users. Such data centers typically have massive numbers of servers, switches and storage devices to store and manage data so it may be accessed in a convenient manner by remote computer users. Typically a data center has physical rack structures with attendant power and communication connections. The racks are arranged in rows throughout the room or rooms of the data center. Each rack includes a frame that has vertically oriented slots that may hold multiple devices such as servers, switches and storage devices. There are many such devices stacked in such rack structures found in a modern data center. For example, some data centers have tens of thousands of servers and attendant storage devices and network switches. Thus, a typical data center may include tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of devices in hundreds or thousands of individual racks. Data centers typically have an administrative system in a control center to monitor and insure proper operation of the equipment. For management purposes, an administrator would like to have instantaneous knowledge of the location of devices in the rack and the location of rack in the data center. Such information must be obtained and recorded when the data center is set up, when equipment is replaced, or when new racks of devices are added to the data center.
Knowledge of the location of specific equipment in such racks is necessary for monitoring, maintenance, trouble-shooting and replacement of data center equipment. When such equipment is installed, the location of the equipment must be recorded for such future reference. The current methods for identifying the locations of equipment and the corresponding rack include manual inspection, cable routing, or hardware ID. One of these methods must be employed by data center personnel when new equipment is installed or when new racks or equipment are installed.
Each of these existing methods suffers from problems due to the sheer size and scale of the modern data center. Traditional labeling of rack slots for manual inspection and recording is cumbersome as such information is physically at the location of the equipment in the form of a label, but must be recorded by personnel using a separate device such as a bar code reader and then converted to a data format for later access at a control station. Installers must spend time to find the correct label and physically record the equipment, either by inputting the information into an electronic device such as a tablet or even by hand for each rack that is installed. Such procedures are also susceptible to human error in recording the label or even forgetting to record certain installed equipment.
Cable routing requires identification of equipment by activation of a switch plugged into a port on the equipment. This is a time consuming process and is also susceptible to human error. Hardware ID requires one or more backplane boards installed in the rack to have a microcontroller or specialized circuit and a connector. The microcontroller or circuit will report the location ID of rack to the inserted identification equipment via the connector. However, these backplane boards and equipment with this connector are incompatible with current standard design of rack and devices and require extra cost. Further, hardware ID and cable routing both require the devices in the rack to be powered before determination of the location thereby adding additional time to installation.
Thus, there is a need for a system to allow efficient recording of the location of equipment and racks in a data center. There is also a need for a system that allows automatic recording and transmission of location information of newly installed equipment on racks to a remote location. There is a further need for an efficient mechanism for recording identification and location data for equipment during installation in a data center that may be performed automatically upon powering of the installed equipment.